Giuliano Valentino’s family home in west London has been on the market for six months and he has already dropped the price. “We’ll give it away before we actually sell it,” he says.

His predicament is a sharp contrast to the years of frenzied bidding for houses in Britain’s capital, where a quadrupling of prices in the past two decades made the property market look like a one-way bet.

Valentino, a 59-year-old businessman, lowered the price of his four-bedroom house by 75,000 pounds to 860,000 pounds ($1.13 million) but still found no takers.

Potential buyers such as Mo Valipour are holding off. “We went ahead with an offer and then Brexit happened,” said the software engineer.

He said the combination of rising inflation, after last year’s vote to leave the EU drove down the pound, and big uncertainties about what Brexit means for house prices and the economy meant he no longer wanted get into the market.

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Neither are sure when they will be able to move as the unaffordability of housing in London, which now costs around 10 times the average salary, also takes its toll.

At the same time, there are questions about Britain’s political outlook as Prime Minister Theresa May’s grip on power looks shaky and opinion polls show the left-wing opposition Labour Party running neck and neck with her Conservatives.

House prices in London fell by an annual 0.6 percent in September, the first fall in eight years, according to mortgage lender Nationwide, while other measures have shown prices rising far more slowly than in recent years.

In the high-end central London market, estate agent Savills said prices fell 3.2 percent in the year to October.

London’s market has slowed more sharply than the rest of the country but prices across Britain are rising only slowly, potentially boding ill for consumer demand which drives economic growth. The latest figures show British economic growth slowed to an annual 1.5 percent in the second quarter.

The value of the United Kingdom’s housing stock is now at a record £6.8 trillion, almost 1.5 times the value of all the companies on the London Stock Exchange.

Predicting the future direction of the market has become much more difficult, partly because far fewer houses are changing hands.

Five estate agents said sales had effectively ground to a halt in the second quarter due to the uncertainty about Britain’s planned withdrawal from the European Union, combined with higher property taxes and a slowing economy.

“There’s a lack of confidence in the housing market. We are not just not seeing sales,” said an estate agent in Central London, who did not want to be named due to the sensitivity of the situation for his firm’s business.

The latest official statistics show the number of homes sold in London in May were down by over a third compared with two years ago. Preliminary data for June-August 2017 are even more dismal. Those houses that are on the market are taking longer to sell than a year ago, according to online portal Rightmove. tmsnrt.rs/2eZIvl8

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WIDE RANGE OF VIEWS

Twenty-two property market experts surveyed in August by Reuters all said prices in London were over-valued, but their forecasts for the next three years ranged widely from a 17.5 percent drop to a 9 percent rise.

“Time to buckle up,” said Josh Holmans from Valunation, one of the most pessimistic respondents to a separate study by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors which predicted price falls in central London over the next year without giving figures.

“Unless sales pick up pace this train driver may stall her engine. Not confident at all,” he said.

Three estate agents told Reuters they were counting on continuing low interest rates to help house sales. While the Bank of England is widely expected to start raising rates soon, possibly as soon as Nov. 2, most economists expect only a modest and slowly rising path for rates ahead.

For housing, they are weighing worries that Brexit will squeeze incomes and hurt the capital’s big financial services industry against a shortage of homes in low-rise London that has long supported prices.

Martin Ellis, an economist with lender Halifax, is among the many who predict no rise in prices, but also no large drop.

“I think we’re going to be stuck with a flat market for the foreseeable future,” he said. “There is a squeeze on incomes and I don’t expect to see big falls in house prices that would improve affordability for a lot of people.”

Valentino said he bought his house in the early 1990s for 175,000 pounds and neither of his two children, in their early 20s, would be able to buy now.

British parents are predicted to lend more than £6.5 billion this year to help their children become first-time buyers, according to consultancy CEBR. But they often do so by moving somewhere cheaper, something they can only do if they can find a buyer for their more expensive existing home.

Overseas investors bought almost one in every five new-build homes in London last year, according to a study commissioned by London’s mayor. But they have turned cautious since the Brexit vote, property agents told Reuters.

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Some developers have offered to pay the transaction tax in an attempt to win over buyers.

Some real estate agents say the wariness of foreign professionals working in London is adding to the weak market.

John King, a property broker in the affluent suburb of Wimbledon, said some non-British EU nationals were put off buying after their employers shortened their contracts due to uncertainty over their status in Britain after it leaves the EU in 2019.

The affordability crisis means only 65 percent of Britons now own their own homes, below the EU average of 70 percent. In London only half of households do.

Many potential sellers are staying put rather than risk a sale in the weak market. More than half of properties taken off the market so far in 2017 were withdrawn rather than sold, research firm LonRes said.

For now, Valentino is sticking with his plan to sell but he balked at his estate agent’s advice to drop the price a second time.

“Too low,” he said. “We will probably wait and hope things get better.”

Reuters

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For years, Denmark has repeatedly topped surveys as the happiest place on Earth, touted for its positive quality of life, favourable start-up business environment and healthy work-life balance. But now Denmark, and its capital Copenhagen, may have something to cry about: its sky-high rental market.

Popularity, after all, comes at a price. And with Copenhagen’s burgeoning population, the influx of newcomers has led to a housing shortfall, particularly when it comes to rentals, with demand outpacing supply. The City of Copenhagen forecasts that the city will grow by 11,000 people by the end of 2016 and a full 100,000 by 2027.

"We will hit a milestone this year when we pass 600,000 Copenhageners. That means that we will continue to have an enormous need to build housing that Copenhageners with normal incomes can afford to buy,” says the city’s mayor Frank Jensen. The city hopes to earmark 9,000 new residences for lower and middle class workers and has worked to avoid a city of only luxury apartments.

The game changer

There are two main reasons for the rise in housing competition — more Danish couples are staying in the city once they start a family rather than moving to nearby suburbs, plus there are more people moving into the city. City officials say that 45,000 new residences need to be built in the next 10 years to accommodate this rise.

There is a lot of new development in the city, notably in Nordhavn, Carlsberg Byen and Sluseholmen, all former industrial areas. But Charlotte Larsen, who runs a company called Copenhagen Housing assisting expats in finding places to live in the city, fears these areas are not necessarily going to benefit people seeking rentals.

“Unfortunately most of the newly built apartments in Copenhagen are big, expensive places. We need smaller apartments for less than 10,000 Danish kroner (about $1,500) per month… to meet the demand.” A 97-square-metre apartment in Carlsberg Byen or 70-square-metre one in Nordhavn will set you back 3.4m kroner ($501,422) to buy. By comparison, rental of a 100-square-metre apartment with sea views in Nordhavn is currently at 18,000 kroner ($2,655) a month.

Playing the field

The rental market in the city has become incredibly complex and massively competitive, Larsen says. “The biggest challenge for people hoping to move to the city is that the number of apartments available for rent is so low and demand far exceeds supply,” she says. It isn’t uncommon for someone to spend three months trying to find a flat at their target price.

Trine Lohmann Pedersen who decided to return to Denmark from Portugal in 2015 agrees. “You need to get on the portals first thing in the morning and keep refreshing the page otherwise somewhere can be listed and gone within hours,” she says. A Danish speaker, Pedersen didn’t have the language barrier when searching, but even so, “was a full-time occupation looking for a place”. It took Pedersen two months to find an apartment.

Rent-stabilisation regulations further complicate matters. Similar to New York City, rent-stabilisation regulations in Copenhagen keep a large swathe of the rental apartments in the old buildings in city centre artificially low in rent so they rarely become free. This means those that aren’t rent controlled (for example apartments that are renovated or built after 1991) are expensive to rent, Larsen explains. A 70-square-metre rent-stabilised apartment of could cost as little as 6,400 kroner ($943) per month, whereas the average one-bedroom apartment on the open market in the city centre runs 8,634 kroner ($1,272). Between 1% and 6% of rentals were built after 1991, according to reports from 2015 and 2016.

And landlords keep upping the ante to secure a lease. It is not unusual, for example, to be asked for the equivalent of seven months’ rent upfront (three months’ rent as a deposit, three months prepaid rent and then the first month’s rent) to secure a property. Many people take out loans to cover this.

Looking further afield

As is the case with many popular metropolitan cities around the globe, the prices drop considerably and options increase if you decide to live further out of the city. “It is essential to set expectations right and to be prepared to accept living other places than the city centre,” Larsen says. “With public transport many outlining places are still within a half hour commute of the city.”

Alex Ross, a former teacher from the UK, moved to Copenhagen in March 2016. “It was challenging to find a home within the budget we had, but it was made easier by not being picky about the areas we were looking at. We wanted to be close to Copenhagen but were happy to live outside of the city, and this allowed us to get more for our money.”

Ross was also flexible when he arrived in Copenhagen. “Our first move to Copenhagen was into a shared accommodation. This had some huge benefits in terms of getting to know the local community and make friends.”

And before arriving, be sure to do your homework and set realistic budgetary expectations. Kara Wong from San Diego, California, in the US found the prices in the city a lot higher than she expected.

“I ended up having to increase my budget by about 25% in order to find a place in the city. The location I ended up in was not one of the options of neighbourhoods I had originally hoped for,” she says, adding that she loves the city nonetheless. “One must either be prepared for disappointment or increase budget significantly in order to find an accommodation here.”

Britain is a nation of tea drinkers – but for how much longer? New research released by the National Food Survey suggests that Britons are falling out of love with their morning “cuppa”. But in fact the UK has been losing its taste for tea for decades. Tea consumption has fallen steadily since “peak tea” was reached in 1956. When tea was rationed during World War II, the ration was 2oz (56g) per person per week. At 25g of tea per person per week, Britons now consume less than half the amount of tea they did during the war.

This might seem like a blow to a core component of British identity, but the British “way” of making tea – black tea, frequently served with milk and sugar – is comparatively recent in origin. When tea was first consumed in Britain in the 17th century, most Britons made green tea, drunk from tiny porcelain cups without handles. Though some took it with a little sugar, tea was almost always served without milk. During this period, all tea was from China, and the most popular kinds were green tea, though increasingly some preferred “bohea”, an oolong that produced a pale reddish-brown infusion.

It wasn’t until the 1850s that tea from India started to be imported in any quantities, and the British fondness for Assam, Darjeeling and Ceylon teas began to form. The tea they produced was more like what we expect now: tea that quickly stains the water a dark brown colour, with a pronounced and tannic flavour, suitable for taking with milk. And in its time, this shift was certainly driven to some extent by what was considered cool.

Tea from India and Sri Lanka was grown on substantial industrialised plantations, managed and financed by predominantly British companies, employing large numbers of indentured Indian workers. Rather than the artisanal production processes of Chinese smallholders, tea production in British India was mechanised as far as possible. By the 1920s, the introduction of new “rip-tear-curl” technology allowed the tea leaves to be processed and cured almost entirely by machine. The machines produced the super-oxidized “black tea” we are now familiar with, losing some of the more delicate flavours of the handmade method. This tea was cheaper and more efficient for tea companies to produce, and, because it made a darker and more tannic brew, was welcomed by consumers.

The 20th century also saw the adoption of an American invention, the teabag, which brought convenience and efficiency for the consumer, but also enacted a little economic miracle for tea companies. Teabags further reduced the quality and the quantity of tea needed to satisfy consumers. Teabags could be filled with the lowest grades of tea, the waste grades of dust and fannings. Over 96% of tea in Britain is now made with teabags. Nobody pretends this is good tea.

The decline in tea consumption might be attributed to changing tastes, and increased competition from hot drinks with more glamour, especially the various varieties of hot foamy milk and coffee served up by the espresso coffee chains. Despite the fact that some of these drinks often contain a “dangerously” high level of sugar, as Action on Sugar recently claimed, they remain enormously popular with young consumers.

So the decline in tea consumption is partly the fault of the tea industry. Industry analysts talk about how tea appeals to the throat and the mind. “Throat” describes how much tea is consumed, literally poured down the throat. “Mind” describes how tea is understood, and what it means. Despite commanding a considerable residual hold on the throat, tea’s share of the hot drinks market is declining because its grip on the mind is weak. To the mind, tea is comfortable, homely, ordinary – and a little boring. Tea is just not very cool, and as a result, it is slowly losing “throat appeal”.

In order to revive tea, some industry pundits argue they need to win the battle for the mind first. This is what coffee did: the CEO of Starbucks Howard Shultz is fond of saying his company revivified the retail coffee market in the United States by recovering “the romance of coffee”.

So it’s encouraging that numerous tea retailers, both small boutique operations and large conglomerates, have recently opened gourmet tea retailers on the high street, seeking to extend customers' interest in more diverse (and higher priced!) tea experiences. There will be more, as the tea industry seeks to find ways to make the British way of taking tea an aspirational experience once again, not merely a brief encounter between a mug and teabag. Hipsters may be the only people who can transform tea’s fortunes.

The first few months of a new year can be a stressful time financially. The Christmas holidays typically lead to depleted savings and higher credit card balances, while tax season is right around the corner.

Unfortunately for most us, this isn’t a seasonal dilemma but a chronic problem that brings anxiety throughout the year.

Indeed, as many as 44 percent of American households don’t have enough savings to cover basic expenses for even three months. Without a savings cushion, even regular seasonal expenses like holiday celebrations may end up feeling “unexpected” and lead households to turn to credit to cover costs.

U.S. consumers currently hold US$880 billion in revolving debt, with an average credit card balance of almost $6,000. The picture is even more dire for lower-income households.

So how can we turn this around? Many tacks have been tried but fallen short for one reason or another. Fortunately, behavioral science offers some useful insights, as our research shows.

What’s wrong with current approaches

Typical approaches to solving problematic finances are either to “educate” people about the need to save more or to “incentivize” savings with monetary rewards.

They also don’t need to be convinced of the value of saving. Many want to save but face additional obstacles to financial health.

For example, these households often face uncertainty about their cash flows, making planning for expenses even more difficult. More generally, they have little room for error in their budgets and the costs of small mistakes can compound rapidly.

Brain barriers

In this volatile context, psychological barriers common to all people exacerbate the problem.

People have difficulty thinking about the future. We treat our future, older selves as if they are strangers, decreasing motivation to make tradeoffs in the present. Additionally, we underpredict future expenses, leading us to spend more than precise budgeting can account for.

When we do focus on the future, people have a hard time figuring out which financial goals to tackle.

In research that we conducted with Rourke O’Brien of the University of Wisconsin, we found that consumers often focus either on saving money or on repaying debt. In reality, both actions simultaneously interact, contributing to overall financial health.

This can be problematic when people misguidedly take on high-interest debt while holding money in low-interest saving accounts at the same time. And, once people have identified building savings or repaying debt as an important goal, they have difficulty identifying how much should be put toward it each month. As a result, they rely on information in the environment to help determine this amount (like getting “anchored” on specific numbers that are presented as suggestions on credit card payment statements).

Unfortunately, the way current banking products are designed often makes these psychological realities worse.

For example, the information on many credit card payment systems nudges consumers toward paying the minimum balance rather than a higher amount. Budgeting tools assume income and expenses stay the same from month to month (not true for most lower-wage workers) and expect us to monitor spending against a long list of separate, complicated budget categories.

On a deeper level, the fact that banks offer credit and savings products separately exacerbates the psychological distance between paying down debt and building savings, even though these are linked behaviors.

Behavioral banking

For instance, changing the “suggested payoff” in credit card statements for targeted segments (i.e., those who were already paying in full) could help consumers more effectively pay down debt, as could allowing tax refunds to be directly applied toward debt repayment. Well-designed budgeting tools that leverage financial technology could be integrated into government programs. The state of California, for example, is currently exploring ways to implement such technologies across a variety of platforms.

But the public and private sectors both need to play a role for these tools to be effective. Creating an integrated credit-and-saving product, for example, would require buy-in from regulators along with financial providers.

While these banking solutions may not close the economic inequality gap on their own, behaviorally informed design shifts can be the missing piece of the puzzle in these efforts to fix major problems.

Our research indicates that people already want to be doing a better job with their finances; we just need to make it a little less difficult for them. And making small changes to banking products can go a long way in helping people stabilize their finances so they can focus on other aspects of their lives.

Thousands of people flocked this weekend to check out the winners of “Reinventing Paris”, an international architecture competition to transform the city’s forgotten public buildings and spaces into environmentally-friendly urban designs.

Imagine a massive spaceship-like building planted with 1,000 trees straddling the périphérique motorway circling Paris. Or a nearly 100-year-old former electricity sub-station transformed into a multi-screen movie theatre and entertainment hall.

These are just a couple examples of the winners of “Reinventing Paris”, an international architecture competition to transform 23 sites across the French capital into innovative environmentally-friendly urban designs.

The contest, which was launched in October 2014 by Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, drew a total of 372 entries from both big and small architecture firms, 75 of which were selected as finalists. Hidalgo unveiled the winners last week at an exhibition at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal, the centre for architecture and urban planning in Paris.

The proposals will now enter the construction phase, which Hidalgo said would be completed “in record time” by 2020, and will create around 2,000 jobs per year. Overall, the project is expected to cost the city €1.3 billion.

Eager to see how Paris is going to change, an estimated 3,500 people turned out this weekend to the see the exhibition, according to event organisers, who said they expect more than 60,000 visitors over the next three months.

In addition to the winners of “Reinventing Paris”, the exhibition showcases entries from the first and second runners-up, as well as other finalists.

The “Reinventing Paris” exhibition at the Pavillon d’Arsenal runs until May 8. For more information, please visit the centre’s website, or www.reinventer.paris.

However, the academic behind the happiness questions in the Office for National Statistics survey says there are ways to tackle your own levels of happiness.

Paul Dolan, author of the bestselling Happiness By Designand professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics, said patterns can be broken by taking care to enjoy the little things in life.

“I think too much is being made of the U-shape dip [that happens in the 40s and 50s],” he said. “It’s all about actually changing what you do to do more of the things we like – listen to music, go outdoors, meet friends and new people. If everybody did that every day we’d be a lot happier.”

Dolan asked the ONS to insert questions into its survey that, rather than simply asking people how happy they felt, asked about how satisified they felt with certain aspects of their life and how worthwhile they felt.

“When you’re young you have all this false optimism about life; when you are in midlife most people haven’t achieved what they would like to, and then by the time you’re in your late 50s you start to get over yourself and start doing things you like, caring less about social comparisons,” he said. He said that asking people how happy they are when they are doing stuff makes a messier pattern. “When it comes to a sense of purpose the pleasure profile is really quite complex,” he says. “People with the least levels of purpose are actually young people.”

He has another key piece of advice. Don’t try a self-help book. “It’s an explosive genre because they explain how you could feel but not how to achieve that. They don’t work, they merely encourage people to go and buy another self-help book. I think we are all searching for fun and fulfillment and we all too often get the balance wrong and make all sorts of mistakes We are searching for optimal balance but that’s not to say we should be searching for it by looking for it all the time,” he said.

Grappling with the concept of happiness might seem like a modern obsession but is anything but. Dolan points out that the U-shape in happiness has been replicated in surveys around the globe, in all cultures. Aristotle came up with the comment that “happiness depends upon ourselves” – at a time when unfortunately the quote’s potential as an inspirational Facebook posting could not be realised. But if he enshrined happiness as a central purpose of human life and a goal in itself around 320BC, then the struggle people have to find wellbeing today is more about the human condition than modern stress levels.

Dolan, who was also a member of the government’s Behavioural Insights Team – or “Nudge Unit” – which was set up to suggest small changes that people could make to improve their health and wellbeing, says there is a key difference between how people often evaluate their lives and actually experience them. “Don’t pay attention to how happy things make you. Instead, find things which make you feel good, then do more of them.

Mindset change can be hard but behavioural change less so, he said. “A long-term sustainable impact on your life can be achieved but not by sitting about thinking if only I was slimmer, fitter, richer, then I would be happier,” he said. “It’s not going to happen, so you’ll still be miserable.”

The heyday of ballroom dancing may have ended with Truman Capote's famed Black & White Ball, but television shows like Dancing with the Stars are helping to revive the dance style. You can keep the trend going with a ballroom-themed birthday party.

Invitations: Cut out miniature ball gown skirts from a piece of silk fabric and use ribbon for a sash. Glue them to cardstock or construction paper folded in the shape of a card. Write all of the party information with gold paint pen.

Decorations: Create a festive mood with black, white, and gold balloons and streamers. Attach silver stars to the ends of helium-filled balloons so that they hang down from the ceiling. Tape up pictures of musical notes and silhouettes of ballroom dancers. Set a fancy lunch table with music-note-themed paper goods (from your local party center) and plastic champagne flutes. A paper top hat tied to a bouquet of balloons makes an elegant centerpiece.

Activities: Have the guests dress up for the occasion. Or make basic ball gown skirts with sashes using remnants and trims from a local fabric store. Have white gloves and extra jewelry for the guests to wear when they arrive. Hire a local dance instructor to teach the young ladies (and gentleman) some basic moves such as the box step or a simple swing. Then turn them loose to cut a rug on the dance floor.

Snacks: Serve elegant but kid-friendly finger foods such as mini quiches, pigs in blankets, and chicken skewers. Fill the champagne flutes with sparkling cider. Have candy-coated chocolate mints on the table.

Birthday Cake: Dazzle the birthday girl with a homemade chocolate cake topped with a circle of chocolate-dipped strawberries for dessert.

With my arms clamped tightly to the side of my clammy swimming costume, I face the naked woman who’s gesticulating wildly and firing a torrent of Danish at me. When I haltingly ask her whether she speaks English, she barely pauses for breath before ordering me – in perfect English – to take off my costume and make my way to the communal shower, for reasons of hygiene.

In Denmark it is mandatory to sluice down naked before entering a swimming pool, and they take the rules very seriously. Judging from the streams of women relaxing in the nude, they are so body confident that they jump at any opportunity to take their clothes off anyway.

The women in Nordic-noir dramas are usually attractive, overtly sexual and self-confident, and Saga Norén, the Swedish detective in the Danish police procedural The Bridge will whip off her T-shirt in front of her hard-bitten colleagues without a second thought.

The Danes have even officially been dubbed the most shameless nation in the world, based on research by the University of Zurich. And, after two years of living here, I’ve finally been inspired to learn to love my body the Scandinavian way.

Danish body confidence begins in January. In Denmark nobody bothers to deprive themselves in the cold dark of winter. Last year, my ‘dry January’ met with baffled looks from my Danish friends as they helped themselves to the pastries their country is famous for.

Fretting about the way they look or obsessing over staying in shape isn’t something my slender Scandi friends indulge in because, fittingly for residents of the happiest nation in the world, most of them feel fine just the way they are.

This nonchalant approach spans the ages – if the group of septuagenarian Danes I see plunging naked into the icy sea on my local beach just north of Copenhagen all year around are anything to go by. When I eventually catch up with one on dry land and ask her how she plucks up the courage to bare all, she seems surprised by the stupidity of my question.

‘Have you ever tried to wear a wet swimsuit when the temperature is below five degrees Celsius?’ she asks me. ‘You would not want to!’ The study by the University of Zurich (which seems to have made Danish nudity something of a specialist subject) suggests that Danes are conditioned not to feel shame: a mere 1.62 per cent of the population suffers from gelotophobia, or fear of ridicule, the lowest figure of the any country surveyed.

Of course, Britain topped the gelotophobia charts, with a staggering 13 per cent. Put simply, Danish children don’t grow up paralysed by the fear of being laughed at the way that we do. While I spent my school career avoiding the showers after PE, in Denmark friends tell me they were made to shower together after every class, with no separate cubicles.